Ideas for Using Garden Veggies Series: Fresh Green Bean Recipes

This year, we are actually growing a new bean for us – the purple podded pole bean.

They are very much like plain ol’ pole green beans, but purple! We are still growing the classic green bean too, so hopefully our supply will be twice as much this year!

Well, that means it’s time for lots of green bean ideas. We are going to share a few with you here and will keep adding ideas to our green beans page here as we find them and as we continue our Ideas for Using Garden Veggies series.

Before we continue with ideas and recipes, we wanted to remind you that we have been sharing so many gardening ideas on our Garden Gallery of Ideas HERE, Pinterest HERE and Facebook HERE that we hope you are seeing some incredible results with your homegrown food supply. And, as always, we will continue to share gardening tips and ideas on all our site.

So, here’s some ideas to help you use up all of your fresh green beans this year!

First, we would like to share this recipe from the Happy Deal Happy Day site for Fresh Green Bean Recipes of Green Beans with Lemon Nutmeg Dressing. Yum!

Second, you can literally make many variations of the classic pan fried or sautéed green beans. This is pretty much what we do when we are in a bind (meaning, not having other recipes up our sleeves, or need something now!)

Here’s a list of the best items to throw in a pan with butter or olive oil and pan fry or sauté your green beans. You can make this in 10-minutes, so it really is your last minute side dish! You can make dozens of variations with these ingredients to make it different every time:

Slivered/chopped almonds

Bacon

Mushrooms

Garlic

Parmesan Cheese

Apple Chunks

Onions

Lemon

Black Pepper

Salt

Turmeric

Cayenne Pepper

*What else can you think of?

Just simply place your ingredients in a pan on the stove and sauté over medium heat until green beans are soft!

Now the next thing we wanted to share, was how to freeze green beans. If you simply have too many, run out of ideas or are just plain sick of green beans today and want ideas to preserve them for the future, then considering freezing green beans. We like to freeze them because we can still use them in “fresh” recipes and for pan frying/sautéing.

How to freeze green beans:

Wash the beans

Trim the ends of the beans and perhaps cut down to desired size

Blanch the beans – either blanch in a pot of boiling water or a steamer for 3 minutes.

Pull them out and then throw them in a bowl of ice water for 3minutes.

Then drain them and let them dry for a few minutes. A salad spinner will also help speed up drying time. Even dabbing with a paper towel will help!

Finally, bag them up and label them with the date! Freeze and enjoy later!

So what plans do you have for your green beans?

Keep watching for more ideas on using your garden veggies as we have many more veggies recipes and ideas to share this summer with you as you make the most of your garden and farmer’s market finds!